I stayed home and joined the circus
My first time trying aerial silks was at Burning Man, under a massive dusty circus rig amid thumping bass. My partner and I were spending the summer road tripping across the country in a ramshackle moving van that he had salvaged from a junkyard — climbing rocks, swimming in alpine lakes, and enjoying our new post-college freedom. I got a crash course in silks from someone in Swing City, and was immediately hooked. I loved how the apparatus combined strength, gracefulness, musicality and problem-solving. It used a lot of the same muscles as climbing, but tickled a different part of my brain that thought about performance instead of just execution.
A little while later, I settled down in San Francisco and rekindled the love affair with silks that I had started in the desert. I joined Aerial Artique, an aerials and acroyoga studio, where I took classes after work. I occasionally made it out to Circus Center, with their intimidatingly tall ceilings and ruthless instructors. And most critically, I made friends with a group of circus and aerial performers who lived in a warehouse-turned-group-house and-performance-space in SoMa, called Dovetail. The folks at Dovetail hosted weekly circus jams, where they invited friends to use their aerial rigs and train together. I’d come practice the sequences I learned from class, learn new tricks from others, and get inspired.
Since many of the Dovetail friends performed circus and aerial acts, they would organize showcase events where people could perform their works-in-progress, and get feedback and support from the audience. These were magical nights, full of beautiful showmanship and a really lovely sense of community. After attending a few showcases, I was inspired to put together a silks act of my own to perform. But before I was able to choreograph and polish an act I was happy with, the pandemic hit and open-invite aerial jams became a thing of the past.
Unsurprisingly, the pandemic greatly changed the San Francisco circus and aerial scene. My favorite studio, Aerial Artique, shut down over the pandemic, and Dovetail also disbanded. During this time, I refocused my efforts on climbing, and was lucky enough to have a great quarantine crew to train and adventure with. We built a bouldering wall in Mel/Alan/Julie/Marty’s backyard, and had fun decorating and setting weird routes on it. On weekends we drove out to Yosemite, and got better at crack climbing and long multipitch routes until we eventually felt ready for big projects such as The Nose on El Capitan, and other Yosemite testpieces such as the Rostrum and Astroman.
However, I missed the musicality and performance aspects of aerial silks. This year, I decided to pick silks back up, and revisit my pandemic-interrupted project of putting together an aerial silks performance. I joined Inspiration Studios, and began regularly taking classes after work and training at their open gym on the weekends. Before long, I had acquired a large enough corpus of tricks and transitions that I was losing track of what tricks I had learned, and their relationships to each other. So as the nerd I am, I made an “aerial skillbook” with photos and GIFs of each trick, notes for how to enter and exit from it, and its relations to other tricks. I soon learned that one of my classmates, Eden, had done a similar exercise, and we compared notes.
After one of my silks classes, I saw a poster in the lobby of Inspiration Studios calling for applications to their summer showcase. I saw that there was an option to apply for a group performance, but upon closer inspection the group rehearsals didn’t fit my schedule, so a solo performance was my only option. I submitted a performance application to the organizers, with a “portfolio” of videos from Aerial Artique sequences and Dovetail jams.
Renee (the owner of Inspiration Studios) emailed me a few days later and said I had been accepted, and that she was looking forward to seeing what I put together! So I started preparing, by picking my favorite tricks and trying to string them together with graceful and interesting transitions. I was particularly inspired by the flowing and effortless transitions of Zoë Isadora — I watched a lot of her videos and lessons as I was preparing my routine.
A really fun part of the choreography process was picking out the music! I was looking for something simple, smooth, and low-tempo, but with a driving and bass-forward chorus. I liked “Not Enough” by Elvis Drew and Avivian, and felt particularly drawn to the moody guitar line. “I Feel Like I’m Drowning” by Two Feet had many of the same elements as well. Ultimately, I felt more excited to listen to “Not Enough” a million times while choreographing, so I chose that as my showcase song. It wasn’t quite long enough (2:40), so Harry and I used some elbow grease and song editing software to add one more repeat of the chorus, bringing it up to 4 minutes.
Inspiration Studio added additional “open studio” slots for performers, so I came in on weeknights and weekends to practice my set. I would listen to the song on headphones (to not disturb other aerialists), record myself doing the sequence, then come down and watch the video while drinking water and catching my breath. I would then change up the sequence or timing based on how the video looked… and rinse and repeat. In the beginning of the choreography process, I would make large changes such as which tricks to include and in what order. By the last few weeks, I was focusing on the finer details of showmanship, such as where I was looking during each trick, hand flourishes, dramatic pauses, and the timing of each trick to match the music.
The day of the performance finally arrived! I invited some friends who were a part of my aerial journey: Rilka, who was my first silks mentor; Julie, Aurora, and Ember, who took silks and hammock classes with me; and of course my husband, Harry, who helped me edit the song and was so supportive through the whole process! As I was called to the stage, I was “scroked”, which is my term for “scared and stoked”. I walked to the silks, and waited for the music to start…
My first trick off the ground was a split-silk invert into splits. I spent a LOT of time stretching my splits in preparation for the performance!
I put on a footlock, inverted, and took a moment to strike a dramatic pose. This also gave me a moment of rest before going into a fancy split-silk double footlock sequence.
From double footlocks, I was able to hit this fun split pose! Careful observers might notice that all the splits in my performance were on my right side, because that side was more flexible. (Do what I say, not what I do… always stretch both sides equally!)
I went hands free, and balanced precariously for a few seconds in this position (with some wobbling). In the video Harry recorded, you can hear him laugh and shout “wiggle wiggle!” at this point (not helpful, Harry!)
An interesting and directionally-challenging transition brought me to the crossback straddle, where I was able to go hands-free again and rest for a second before launching into an inversion sequence.
I inverted, hooked my leg for stability, and dramatically untangled the silks to make sure they were separated before going into the tick-tock drop.
I originally wasn’t planning to put the “music box” trick into my performance because it was too simple and easy, but Harry said that was his favorite trick, so I included it for him (and as a chance to take a breather!) It ended up looking really pretty though — which goes to show, not every trick has to be a difficult one!
As I was setting up for my big double-star drop, I tossed the silk over my free leg and the photographer captured this beautiful moment. This is one of the reasons I enjoy silks (as opposed to hard aerial apparatuses) — they really have a mind of their own, and move so fluidly and dynamically!
I took a deep breath, and let go into the double-star drop. The photographer caught me mid-drop! I love how the tail of the silk curves around so elegantly. I have never seen myself mid-drop before, and am pleased to see that I kept good form (arms and legs out like a star, strong core with no twisting). This was the scariest part of my performance, but I drilled the drop so many times that I felt confident I had it dialed.
The “cartwheel” is one of my favorite tricks, because you can do it over and over and over again (the end position is the same as the start position). Here, I’m coming up at the end of my second consecutive cartwheel with some anti-gravity hair, for my grand finale.
And that was a wrap! I was the last performer before Renee (who was a very cute cat, performing aerial hoop). We finished with performer bows, and some photos with my friends. Of course my friends picked me up!
Many thanks to Ken (@poleninjaphotography) for the gorgeous photos! Here are some more photos and videos from the performance. My favorite video is the video Harry took, because of his cheering and narration — this was his first time watching my entire performance, and I love his surprised exclamations!
After the performance, we headed to Wursthall for some celebratory bratwurst and beers, where we discussed the highlights of the showcase. For me, the highlight was finally seeing my pre- and post-pandemic silks journey come together into a performance I was really happy with, and to be able to share that with friends who were an important part of that journey!
